Not sure how many of you are aware, but since PGI (game dev studio for MWO) took over all its own publishing rights in August 2014, the president of PGI has been having regular Town Hall meetings. I think he's doing one or two a month.

Town Hall Meeting = a leader gathers members of the community and has a Q&A session about what's going on. In this case, it's all done on twitchtv and the "community" are the people in the chat room for that channel. Most questions are posted on the MWO website before hand and they pick the best/most asked ones for the meeting, and if any topic get shouted enough by the people in chat, they'll try to work those in as well.

This is the most transparent and responsive PGI has been since the creation of the game and I think it's very good of them to keep up like this.

In case you don't want to listen to it for 2 hours, the major topics covered in this one...

A lot of improvements coming for CW, like more detailed queue info, and better alerts ("call to arms") for planets that are needing more players to form full 12v12 matches.

Among those I find very interesting are new game types (nothing firm yet) that allow for smaller groups to have an impact in CW. Things like having 4v4 matches and Player vs Environment modes that are more like missions to scout/destroy objectives. I don't think he gave a firm date on this, but it sounded like something in the first or second Quarter this year. I haven't been playing MWO much since the release of CW, and a lot of that is because CW sucks for solo players and small groups, but it looks like this could remedy that.

1 new CW map each month for the next 4 months.

New "counter-attack" mode for CW that sounds like a "skirmish" mode with dropships. To be released in early February.

Built-in VOIP... probably released late February.

MWO on Steam in 2015...maybe Summer, not likely any sooner.

More improvements to the front end (mechlab, etc) to make it more Smurfy-like and streamlined and easier for new users.

And Urban Mech pre-order starts next week...or this week? If enough people actually preorder then it will be released in April. If enough people do not order, then it will be canceled, refunded, and they'll be much less likely to give in to popular demands for things like this in the future.

In regards to Timeline (if you're hardcore about MechWarrior lore, read on) it sounds like they wont rollback the year again, BUT they may not advance to the next year if they're not ready yet (currently it is 3050, so January 1, 2016 in real life would be January 1, 3051 in game) or they may jump ahead if there is something content-wise (mechs, weapons, etc) that they want to include but "can't" because it wouldn't be "correct" for the current "date." I'm hoping this refers to mechs like the Mauler because (I think) even though its technically available at this point in the timeline, it's a previous incarnation, and it doesn't get its full array of variants until a few more years down the line.